Transitivity Analysis of Online News Football Match Report: How The Writers Write Differently

Abstract

Football news is the way to let the public know what have just happened in football world. However, the report presented in football news may be biased by the writer’s view which makes some different perspectives towards a fact which is raised to the public. To analyze some certain perspectives that might be used by the writers, transitivity of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) can be used. This metafunction looks at the participants, processes and circumstances in the texts. This paper showed how transitivity can reveal the perspectives used by the writers. This paper examined three match reports of the match between Manchester City FC and Chelsea FC on September 21st, 2014 from three different websites. This paper revealed which match report was taking a side or neutral related with the participants, processes and circumstances involved. This paper also related the using of transitivity components with the purpose of the texts. By analyzing the actors involved, the point of view of the writers could be recognized. In the end, this paper showed that two of three texts took sides while one was neutral. Finally, this paper showed that transitivity analysis in SFL can be a tool to measure whether a text is biased by its writer’s opinions or not.